Friesel urges the necessity of a "general reform," and professes to take Western Europe as a model, but all he adopted thence was the most objectionable tactics of "enlightened absolutism." In his opinion "the education of the Jewish people must begin with their religion." It is necessary "to wipe out all Jewish sects with their superstitions and to forbid strictly the introduction of any innovations whereby impostors might seduce the masses and plunge them into ever greater ignorance," a veiled allusion to the Hasidim and in particular to their Tzaddiks, whose strife with the anti-Hasidic rabbis was engaging the attention of the Russian Government at the time. He further recommends that the Jews be forced to send their children to the Government schools, to conduct all their business in Polish, to wear the customary non-Jewish form of dress, and not to marry before the age of twenty. Finally the Jews are to be classified in three categories, merchants, artisans, and tillers of the soil, these three estates to form part of the general class stratification of the Empire. In this way the fiscal services of the Kahals could be dispensed with, and the Kahals themselves would pass out of existence automatically. The suggestions of the leaders of the nobility as well as the proposals of the governors were turned over in the spring of 1800 to the Senate, whose function was to examine and utilize them for a new legal enactment or "statute." Here they happened to fall into the hands of one of the Senators, Gabriel Dyerzhavin, the celebrated Russian poet, who by the whim of fate was soon to blossom forth into a "specialist" _in rebus Judaicis_. 3. DYERZHAVIN'S "OPINION" ON THE JEWISH PROBLEM